Every time I boot the windows laptop that I rarely use, I have to run about an hour of updates, and then usually I have maybe 10-15 minutes of work to get done.

Adam

Just wait till the next time you do a fresh install of XP

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. ~C. S. Lewis

I patch 4 windows partitions once and sometimes twice a month. If I were more on top of things, I'd make images oftener. I rarely do a clean install; when something goes south, I reload a past image. Less patching and updating needed.

It only takes me a couple minutes to update my Win 7 on my laptop every week or so when I fire it up to pay bills and such. My XP installation (for gaming) on my main system is updated weekly also.

A fresh install of XP isn't so bad if you have SP2 and 3 on CDs, as I do. It still takes about an hour to download the most current updates for it, though (at 15M/5M FIOS speeds), once I get the newly installed XP online for the first time.